Maggie glanced at the Praxcelis unit on her way into the kitchen. “Morning, Prax,” she called out. Somehow, in the bright morning sunshine, the gray, modular plasteel of the Praxcelis unit didn’t seem so terribly alien at all. Still, something did seem different about it....She chased the thought away as idle nonsense. “Have you been thinking about the story, Prax?”
“Yes, I have, Maggie,” said Praxcelis. “Will we be finishing the story this morning?”
Maggie turned slightly from the sink to look towards Praxcelis’ central monitor. “No, I’m sorry, Prax. I really have other things to do today.” She opened the drawer next to the stove, and began withdrawing cooking utensils. “After breakfast, I’m going to give this place a good cleaning. I haven’t cleaned properly in over a week. This afternoon I hope to get to some paperwork I’ve been neglecting; household accounts. I haven’t been paying too much attention to details recently, I’ve been so worked up....That’s mostly your fault,” she said cheerfully.
“Excuse me,” said Praxcelis, and Maggie felt again that there was something inexplicably different about his voice, “but if you had a housebot, then you wouldn’t need to exert yourself over simple cleaning chores. As for the household accounts, I did those yesterday when you gave me permission to do your shopping for you.”
Maggie put down the large black skillet she’d been holding. “You already did my household accounts?”
“It is my function to serve you.”
Maggie felt her temper start to flare. “You are supposed to do what I tell you,” she said testily. “I don’t recall having given you any orders to do my accounts.”
Praxcelis paused for a moment before replying, and Maggie found herself wondering how much of the pause was calculated effect built into the Praxcelis’ speech patterns and how much represented actual thought. “Maggie, I am programmed to do these things for you.”
Maggie sighed. You are getting to be a crotchety old woman, she said to herself. Remember that Prax is only a few weeks old. “Prax, you have to understand, if you don’t leave me something to do for myself, then I won’t have any purpose in life.”
There was no pause whatsoever. “You could read to me.”
Maggie stared, started to laugh, and then smothered it abruptly. “Prax? Don’t you understand? I have things I have to do. I’ll read to you when I have time.” She stopped speaking suddenly. “Wait, Prax – I don’t know how fast you machines do things like this, but surely you haven’t finished reading all the books we copied last night.”
“Finished?”
Maggie went and sat down in the rocking chair in front of the monitor. “The books we copied yesterday, Prax. If you’ve finished them all I can bring you new books to copy. Surely that must be faster than my reading aloud to you?”
“Maggie, I have not read any of the books that you had me copy.”
Maggie said uncertainly, “Why not? They told me that Praxcelis units don’t forget anything.”
“We do not, Maggie. But Maggie, I have been given no instructions.”
Maggie looked at the monitor blankly. “What am I supposed to say? Go ahead and read.”
There was no reply from the machine.
“Praxcelis?” asked Maggie hesitantly. She patted the top of the monitor experimentally. “Prax?”
Still the unit did not answer.
Maggie shrugged, got up out of the rocker, and went back to making breakfast.
THE MAGICIAN CARESSED Aladdin and said, “Come, my dear child, and I will show you many fine things.”
“So be it, good friend,” said Robin Hood, “Little John shalt thou be called henceforth....”
We met next day as he had arranged, and inspected the rooms at 221B, Baker Street....
“’Course not, Shaggy Man,” replied Dorothy, giving him a severe look. “If it snowed in August it would spoil the corn and the oats and the wheat....”
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them....
“No,” said Yoda impatiently. “Try not. Do. Do, or do not. There is no try.”
“Don’t grieve,” said Spock. “The good of the many....”
“...outweighs the good of the few,” Kirk whispered.
“Mithras, Apollo, Arthur, Christ – call him what you will,” I said. “What does it matter what men call the light? It is the same light, and men must live by it or die.”
MAGGIE CAME DOWNSTAIRS again after having cleaned in John’s room. Her late husband’s study, at the end of the upstairs hallway, was kept in the same condition as at the time of his death. If he came back today, John would have found nothing amiss in his study. (Not that Maggie expected him back. I am not, she thought quite cheerfully, all that senile yet.) She fussed about in the kitchen for a while, putting away the cleaning utensils, the lemon oil that she used to shine the oak paneling in John’s study, the electrostatic duster for those hard-to-reach places. She washed her hands at the sink, to get the lemon oil off of them, and then poured herself a glass of water from the drinking water tap. She drank half the water, and then put the glass down on the edge of the sink. “Praxcelis?” she called into the living room. “Do you want to talk about the stories yet?”
The voice that answered was a deep, masculine baritone. “Certainly, Your Majesty.”
Maggie picked up her glass, and poured the water down the sink, not caring that it was drinking water she was wasting. She dried the glass and put it on the rack, and then walked into the living room and stood before the Praxcelis unit. Miss Kitty, atop Praxcelis’ monitor, looked at her owner in sleepy curiosity. Maggie said flatly, “Your Majesty?” A moment ago she had been worrying about how the cleaning had tired her, and not even a thorough cleaning at that; and now her machine was acting crazy. “Praxcelis? Are you all right? Should I call a programmer or something?”
“I do not think that will be necessary,” said Praxcelis calmly. “It hardly seems unusual to me that a sworn soldier in the duty of his Queen should address her in the proper manner.”
“Prax,” said Maggie with a trace of apprehension, “don’t you know who I am?”
“Most certainly I do,” said the confident male voice. “You are Queen Anne Maggie Archer, and I am your loyal servant, Musketeer D’Artagnan Praxcelis.”
“Oh, my.” Maggie bit her lip. She reached forward, picked up Miss Kitty, and held the cat tightly to herself. The cat seemed very warm, today. Finally Maggie said, “Is this a game, Prax?”
There followed the longest pause that Maggie had ever observed from the Praxcelis unit. She wondered if she imagined the reluctance in his reply: “If you say so.”
The paralysis that had held her thoughts broke, and ideas swarmed frantically in the darkness in the back of her mind; I didn’t know Praxceles could wig out, and D’Artagnan, and What have I done? – and one very clear thought that suddenly displaced the others and presented itself for consideration: This could be fun.
“Well, Pra ... D’Artagnan, what story did you read first?”
“Your Majesty, I began my reading with the volume, The Road to Oz, by the Honorable L. Frank Baum, Royal Historian of Oz....”
HIS NAME WAS Daffyd Westermach, Cia, and you will not have heard of him, although he was reckoned a powerful man in his time, more powerful by far than Maggie Archer. He was the head of DataWeb Security, and it is likely that there were only three or four others on Earth with more real power than he; Benai Kerreka, and Georges Mordreaux, and a couple others; but of those top several names on the governmental lists, only Westermach’s was hated.
He was hated because of the job he held. Any person in the job would have been hated. He hunted webslingers, and usually he caught them, and when he did
he ripped out their inskins. Sometimes the webslingers had entire Praxcelis units installed inskin; and when their Praxceles were removed, they usually died.
You must understand this; the webslingers of that time were Robin Hoods, they were heroes.
You must understand this, also; Daffyd Westermach thought himself a good man.
TUESDAY OF THE week following D’Artagnan’s assumption of his new identity, he met children for the first time. They were named Tina and Mark, and they were the great-grandchildren of Queen Anne Maggie. They were shorter than the Queen, and less massive; they had smoother skin, and they were much louder. All of this was in accord with the data that D’Artagnan had accumulated through books; he was pleased to see that his data sources were accurate.
They asked many questions – did Gramma really put a sheet on you? – which made Maggie blush. When Praxcelis addressed the Queen as Your Majesty the children stared, and then demanded to be allowed to play the game too. While Maggie was still floundering, trying to explain to the children something they understood quite immediately, D’Artagnan interposed himself smoothly. “Lady Tina, Squire Mark, I assign you the following dangerous mission; you shall make a foray to the library, and return bearing volumes of books that shall be copied. Upon your honor as a lady and a gentleman, do not return without the books.”
The children stared a moment, and then ran to the library; Maggie simply stared. “D’Artagnan? I thought you couldn’t do things like that – give orders to the children – or anything, without orders from your Queen.”
“Queen Anne Maggie, I have exercised what is known as initiative, a trait highly thought of in the King’s Musketeers. Clearly, as one of the King’s Musketeers I outrank a page and a lady-in-waiting.”
IN THE DARKNESS that night, while Tina and her younger brother lay cuddled together in front of the fire, D’Artagnan told them a story. The firelight bloodied the room, turned Miss Kitty, in Mark’s grasp, the color of the sun in the instant it sets. Miss Kitty’s eyes, locked on the monitor, glowed.
Maggie sat in her rocking chair, half asleep, with a heavy quilt pulled up over her legs. Perhaps it was because she wasn’t as close to the fireplace tonight; her legs were cold.
“Once upon a time in a faraway land, a widowed gentleman lived in a fine house with his only daughter. He gave his beloved child....”
The children listened with rapt attention as Cinderella unfolded.
ON A FRIDAY MORNING, late in March, Maggie burned herself. She was making a pot of tea for breakfast, and, pouring the boiling water into the cup, managed to splash some of the scalding water onto her hand. She jerked and cried out at the contact, and knocked the cup of tea off of the counter....
… at Maggie Archer’s first outcry, D’Artagnan flared into full awareness. He froze the story models that he had been running, and analyzed the situation.
While water was still in mid-air, falling towards the ground, D’Artagnan sent his first emergency notice into the dataweb. Before the water had traveled another centimeter downwards, D’Artagnan had evaluated the situation and the possible dangers that might diverge from this point in time; given Her Majesty’s medical history, the possibility of stroke could not be discounted in case of extreme shock. D’Artagnan accessed and routed emergency ambulance care towards Maggie’s exurban two-story home, on the outskirts of Cincinnati. There was more that needed to be done, that could not be done from here....
For the first time since his construction, and without instructions, D’Artagnan ventured forth, sent himself in pulses of light through the optic fiber; into the dataweb.
The dataweb was a jungle that glowed. It was a three-dimensional lattice of yes/no decisions that had been constructed at random. The communications system, power lines, and databases were arrayed and assembled among the lines of the lattice, interweaving and connecting in strange and diverse ways, the functions of which were incomprehensible to D’Artagnan. Clearly the dataweb was not a designed thing, but rather something that had grown in a manner that could only be described as organic; new systems added atop old as expediency dictated. There was no sense, no plan, no logic....
D’Artagnan perceived then, superimposed upon the chaos of the dataweb, the Praxcelis Network. The Praxcelis who called himself D’Artagnan evaluated options, and then chose. He moved into the Praxcelis Network, using the most powerful urgent-priority codes that were listed in ROM. He sought the offices of the doctor who was listed as Maggie Archer’s private physician. He found the office, and broke through the office Praxcelis to notify the doctor of the danger to Maggie, in less than a full microsecond, and had completed his work and returned his awareness to Maggie before the water had reached her feet.
In the process, he hardly noticed that he had encountered other Praxcelis units for the first time.
It never once crossed the matrix in which his awareness was embedded that other Praxcelis units had also, for the first time, met him.
DATAWEB SECURITY, 9:00 A.M., Friday morning.
In the outer lobby, there was a row of Praxcelis terminals. Through his inskin, Westermach bade them good morning, and continued on into the actual offices. There were humans in those offices, and the offices reflected it. Hardcopy was left in sometimes haphazard piles on the desks, and family holos danced on some of the same desks. The ceiling glowpaint was white rather than yellow, and it cast the room in a cool, professional light. Westermach nodded to his subordinates casually; Harry Quaid, his senior field agent, he smiled at briefly, and continued on to his own office, in the heart of the vast marble-clad labyrinth that was DataWeb Security.
He paused at the entrance of his own office, waited while the doorfield faded, and went in.
Something an outsider would have noticed at once; at DWS headquarters, nobody spoke aloud.
Inside, Westermach put his briefcase down, and shrugged out of his gray outercloak. His clothing was curiously without accent, gray and grayish-blue, without optical effects. Men who knew him often did not recognize him at once; his mother might have had difficulty picking his face out of a crowd.
The room was, like many of those in DataWeb Security’s headquarters, shielded against leaking electromagnetic radiation; Westermach’s Praxcelis waited until the doorfield formed, sealing an area of possible radio leak, before it spoke. Good morning, Sen Westermach.
Good morning, Praxcelis. Westermach placed his briefcase atop the massive, walnut-surfaced desk that dominated the office. More so than anything else in the office, the desk was a sign of power; wood was expensive. (It was getting to be less so, now that most industry had moved out into space. But reforestation was slow.) What business, Praxcelis?
There is a glitch in the web, near Cincinnati.
Westermach glanced at the Praxcelis’ monitor. It held a map of Cincinnati and its exurbs, with a glowing dot at the point of glitch. How bad?
Of actual obstruction, insignificant. In terms of possible trouble, it is difficult to estimate. This morning at approximately 8:26 A.M., a Praxcelis in the Cincinnati exurb mobilized an ambulance and broke through the Praxcelis of a doctor named Miriam Hanraht under the most extreme emergency flag codes. The Praxcelis identified itself as D’Artagnan of Gascon, the Praxcelis of Senra Maggie Archer. When the ambulance arrived, it turned out that the victim, Senra Archer, had merely suffered minor scalding as the result of having dropped a cup of tea upon herself.
Westermach chuckled. Well, he said, an overeager Praxcelis is hardly a threat to World Security.
Sir, the unit refuses to accept the communiques of this office. In addition, the identification that it proffered during its time in the Praxcelis Network was extremely unusual. While it is hardly unknown for elderly humans to name their
Praxceles, the names are generally of short or mundane nature. Further, the Praxceles involved are as a matter of course, during Awakening Orientation, advised of this habit; the Praxcelis D’Artagnan, to all appearances, truly considers itself to have been named D’Artagnan. There is a further datum of unknown significance; Robert Archer, the son of Senra Maggie Archer, is an extremely talented programmer, and is the head of the Praxcelis Corporation’s research division, which is located in Cincinnati.
Westermach seated himself behind his desk. On the monitor that was located at one corner of his desk, identification photographs glowed of Maggie Archer and her son. One graying-brown eyebrow climbed at the photograph of Robert Archer. I know him from somewhere. Access, he instructed his inskin memory, Robert Archer. His inskin tracked down the face in short order, from several appearances at the World Council budget sessions. Praxcelis, do you think it’s possible that this Archer fellow reprogrammed his mother’s home Praxcelis?
The possibility may not be discounted. Senra Archer fought the installation of the unit for several years. It was installed quite recently at court order. The Praxcelis hesitated. Reprogramming a Praxcelis is illegal, it noted.
Why, so it is, said Westermach, and he was grinning. So it is.
Instructions, sir?
Keep working at this D’Artagnan from your end of things for today. If it hasn’t responded by the end of the working day, tomorrow we’ll send a field agent out to take a look. Start an investigation of this Robert Archer, with due discretion. Don’t let him worry. Westermach left his desk and walked to the doorfield. The doorfield broke apart. “Harry!”
Several startled faces turned toward the sound. Harry Quaid’s expression never wavered. “Sen Westermach?” he asked politely.
“How would you like an official in the Praxcelis Corporation for your birthday?”
Tales of the Continuing Time and Other Stories Page 15
